Some comments on the diversity of Vermeer paintings depicted on postage stamps

We present some comments on the diversity of the paintings by Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) depicted on postage stamps. We have found 20 of the 36 "recognized" Vermeer paintings depicted on postage stamps issued by 29 "countries"; by country we mean here a stamp-issuing region that issues or has issued its own postage stamps. We apply Fisher's α index of biodiversity [11] to compare the diversity of Vermeer paintings depicted on postage stamps with the diversity of two other data sets [26]. We illustrate our article with images of 7 Vermeer paintings depicted on 10 postage stamps issued by 5 different countries.

[2] Oskar M. Baksalary & George P.H. Styan, eds. (2005), Some comments on the life and publications of Jerzy K. Baksalary (1944-2005), Linear Algebra and its Applications, 410, 3-53.

[3] Oskar M. Baksalary & George P.H. Styan, eds. (2008), Some further comments on the life and publications of Jerzy K. Baksalary (1944-2005). Invited paper submitted for publication in the Special Issue in Honour of Jerzy K. Baksalary (1944-2005) of Discussiones Mathematicae - Probability and Statistics.

[11] R.A. Fisher, A.S. Corbet & C.B. Williams (1943), The relation between the number of species and the number of individuals in a random sample of an animal population, Journal of Animal Ecology, 12, 42-58.